Electronic Arts advertisement from the early 1980’s asks, “Can a Computer Make You Cry?” brings up an interesting idea about artificial intelligence and emotion in video games.  When I watch a movie that is touching, delivered through live action and a narrative that I can connect with, there is a chance that a lump may develop in a my throat if the main characters are facing death. This also happens when something in the movie makes me reflect back on something in my own life that I can connect with.

In video games, I have never had this experience. I have been frieghtened or startled by actions in the game, but have never felt like I would cry.  I think this is because the graphic capabilities in even the best games don’t fully represent the characteristics of human life as well as live action footage does.  Many games I play also take place in a fantasy or science fiction world.  Since I don’t live in that world, I can’t connect with it or the characters on an emotional level.  Perhaps as graphics move toward real life accuracy and if I play more games that I have real world relationships with, this will change.

The Egenfeldt-Nielsen article read more like a blog post than an journal article.  Perhaps it was a language issue, but there were run-on sentences and some misspellings. I liked the discussion of learning 1-3 and how Counterstrike starts off with zero learning in the beginning.  This is how a lot of 8-bit learning games were.  You would wander around and through trial-and-error(learning 1), learn to play the game.

The Jan L. Plass, Bruce Homer & Elizabeth Hayward article was a nice summary of all the multimedia design principles that Mayer, Rieber, Schnotz have set forth for us.  I did appreciate the neural discussion in the beginning as we continue to base multimedia theory in biological facts.  One new theory that I don’t remember hearing of was the guided-discovery theory. It is a nice fusing of constructivist discovery learning with more cognitive, goal-based approach.  I agree whole-heartedly that simulations can do a nice job at this if done well.

Nick Fortugno and Eric Zimmerman offer great insight to me as I struggle to introduce gaming to the administration at my school.  I like the distinction they drive home that in the end, games are games.  They should be fun and a lot gets lost when you try to do too much with them — such as include letter writing campaigns to congress.  I also liked how they talk about the difficulty level of creating games.  I have heard a lot of my students say or attempt to go into game design schools thinking it will be all fun and games.  They even forgo four year schools in favor of game design trade schools thinking.  This article would be an excellent resource for them.

This weeks readings loosely tied together some technological implications on the use of sound.

How do you use sound to create a video game for blind people?  This article was interesting and the thought of designing such a game seems extremely challenging.  It seems like a noble effort and it would be fun to play around would introduce a new arena of game play – even for non-blind gamers.

Listening to Raymond Scott’s songs on iTunes and reading about his works with electronic music machines brought back memories of old cartoons and made me wonder what it was like to create hardware back in the 50s.  All those wires and vacuum tubes.  All done away with when the transistor and microprocessor were invented. I think I am going to dig out the theremin and show my students and even download the app on my iPhone and have them compare and contrast the two.  Maybe we can then listen to some crazy 1950s electronic music from old radio commercials.

What struck me about the Ong article was how he cited Plato’s argument against writing is the same as today’s arguements against computers.